Not Just a Wallflower (A Season Of Secrets #2)(23)
Author: Carole Mortimer

‘Do they need a reason?’ He gave a shrug.

To Ellie’s mind, yes, they most certainly did; Rachel St Just had been so emotional earlier at seeing her son again, after what seemed to have been a lengthy separation, and the dowager was prepared to forgive her grandson anything since he had returned to live at Royston House. ‘Why did you not accompany them to Lady Littleton’s?’

He prised one lid open to look up at her. ‘I may be in the mood for company, Eleanor, but I am not so desperate I would resort to that particular torture!’

She gave a rueful grimace at his obvious disgust. ‘I was thinking of it more in terms of doing something which might please your mother and the dowager, and in doing so, perhaps regain favour with them?’

He gave a shudder as he closed that lid. ‘I am not as anxious as that to regain their approval!’

‘Obviously not.’ Ellie sighed at this obvious display of his usual arrogance. ‘Nevertheless, you really cannot remain here with me, Justin.’

‘Why not, when your bedchamber is so much more comfortable than my own?’

Ellie did not see how that could possibly be true. The dowager had shown her about the main parts of the house when Ellie first came to live here a year ago and she seemed to remember the ducal suite as being opulent, to say the least, with its huge four-poster bed and deep-blue brocade curtains, Georgian furniture and luxurious blue-and-gold Aubusson carpets; her own bedchamber was nice enough, but only a quarter of that size, the bed barely big enough for the two of them to lie down upon together.

An observation which she should not even have been able to make! ‘I cannot believe that. Nor do I think it wise for you to remain here any longer—Justin?’ She eyed him uncertainly as he turned on the bed to face her, and in doing so making her self-consciously aware of the fact that she wore only her nightrail beneath the bedcovers, the bareness of her shoulders currently visible above the sheet, which was now trapped beneath his heavier weight.

‘Did you know you have the most beautiful hair I ever beheld…?’ Justin reached out to take a long red strand between his thumb and fingers. ‘So soft and silky to the touch and like living flame to gaze upon.’ He allowed the silkiness of her hair to fall through his fingers.

‘I do not think this the time or the place for you to remark upon the beauty of my hair.’

‘When else should I remark upon it when it is normally kept confined or hidden away beneath your bonnet?’

‘Not always…’ A blush brightened her cheeks.

No, not always…for had Justin not wound these silken tresses about his partially nak*d body just hours earlier?

He moved up on one elbow the better to observe how smooth and creamy her skin now appeared against that living flame. ‘I could not see you properly in the carriage this afternoon.’ He smoothed his hand across the bare expanse of her shoulder now clearly visible to him. ‘You are very beautiful, Eleanor. Your skin is so soft…’

She held herself stiffly, but even so could not hide the quiver caused by the touch of his caressing fingers. ‘Unless you have forgotten, Justin, I, too, am currently avoiding your company…’

He gave a wicked smile. ‘I have forgotten none of what took place between us this afternoon, Eleanor.’

The colour deepened in her cheeks. ‘Nor, unfortunately, have I. Which is why—’

‘Unfortunately?’ Justin’s fingers curled about her shoulder to hold her in place. ‘That is not particularly flattering, referring to our lovemaking like that, Eleanor.’

‘Lovemaking which should never have taken place!’ She wrenched out of his grasp, quickly moving to the side of the bed and throwing back the covers to stand up, before retrieving her robe from the bedside chair and hastily pulling it on over her nightrail.

Justin lay back, taking unashamed advantage of being able to gaze upon the nak*dness of the body he glimpsed briefly through the sheer material of that nightgown before Eleanor fastened her robe: firm, uptilting, berry-tipped br**sts, slender waist, curvaceous h*ps and thighs above long and slender legs.

A pity, then, that the copious amount of brandy he had consumed earlier this evening appeared to have robbed him of all ability to do anything about it!

He gave a self-disgusted groan as he lay back on the pillows before lifting his arm to place it across his eyes. ‘Does it seem overbright to you in here?’

‘You, sir, are seriously foxed!’

He gave a grunt of acknowledgement, having no need to look at Eleanor to know that she would be glaring down at him disapprovingly. ‘Not at all a surprising state of affairs after the things I have learnt this evening. And not only that,’ he added gruffly, ‘but it seems I am to be bedevilled by desire for a young woman totally unsuited to the role of becoming my mistress!’

Could she be the young woman he meant?

If so, then he was perfectly correct; for she had no intention of ever becoming his mistress or any other man’s, ‘bedevilled by desire’, or otherwise!

She drew in a sharp breath. ‘You will leave my bedchamber right now, sir!’

‘Can’t,’ he mumbled.

‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ She continued to glower down at Justin as she stood beside the bed upon which he still lounged so elegantly, inwardly decrying the fact that he still managed to look so impossibly handsome, despite his less-than-pristine appearance. Or perhaps because of it…

Justin looked far more of a fallen angel in his current state of dishevelment, the gold of his overlong hair having fallen rakishly across his brow, with similar gold curls visible at the open throat of his shirt.

He cracked open that single eyelid once again as he answered her. ‘I mean, dear Eleanor, that if my c*ck is incapable of rising to the occasion after I have gazed upon your delicious near-nakedness, then you may rest assured the rest of me is incapable of rising too!’

Ellie felt the embarrassed colour burning her cheeks. ‘You are both behaving and talking outrageously! And likely you will seriously regret it come morning. Indeed, I believe you will wholeheartedly deserve the debilitating headache that will no doubt strike you down—Justin!’ She gave a protesting hiss as he reached out to grasp her wrist before tugging determinedly, causing her to tumble back down on to the bed beside him. ‘Stop this immediately.’ She fought against the arm and leg he now threw across her br**sts and thighs in order to keep her beside him.

He scowled at her impatiently. ‘Damn it, woman, cease your struggling and try to be of some assistance to me for a change!’

She stilled as she realised he was not attempting to be intimate with her, but was merely using the restraint of his arm and leg as a means of stopping her from struggling any further. That she was not quite as immune as she’d like, to his close proximity and rakish good looks, was no one’s fault but her own. ‘In what way could I possibly be of assistance to you?’

He frowned. ‘You are a woman, are you not?’

‘I believe you are as aware of that as I.’ She raised pointed brows.

‘Exactly.’ He nodded his satisfaction with that fact. ‘And, as such, you understand the way a woman’s mind works.’

‘I understand how my own mind works, I am not so sure about other ladies.’

‘In the light of there being no other lady available, with whom I might discuss this, you will have to do.’ Justin blew out an irritated breath as he once again lay down beside her on the bed to stare up at the ceiling of her bedchamber. ‘Explain to me, if you can, why it is a woman, who has lied to her only child for over half his lifetime, now expects that child to fall at her feet and ask her forgiveness for not understanding sooner, once she has finally—finally!—explained the reason for that lie.’

Ellie at him closely, seeing the evidence of his pain in the way his eyes had darkened and those grim lines had become etched beside his mouth. ‘And would this woman, this mother, happen to be your own?’

He nodded. ‘For years I have believed my mother and father to have been so engrossed in their love for each other, in their need to be exclusively with each other, that they had no room or love to spare in their lives for me, their only child,’ he rasped. ‘And now this evening my mother has told me—I can trust you not to discuss this with anyone else…?’

‘Of course.’ She bristled slightly at his need to ask.

He nodded distracted. ‘This evening I have learnt what my mother and grandparents have always known, that my father was a hero and worked secretly for the crown for many years. That he risked his own life again and again. And latterly my mother chose to put herself in that same danger, when she insisted on travelling with him after I had gone away to boarding school. The two of them succeeded in collecting information which has saved many hundreds of lives over the years.’

And it was obvious, from the mixture of pain and pride Ellie now detected in Justin’s voice, that he had not decided as yet how he felt about that…

Not surprising, really, when he had so obviously become the cynical man that he now was because for so many years he had held a quite different opinion about his parents.

It also confirmed Ellie’s previous belief that this might also be the reason Justin had repeatedly declared he had no intention of being in love with his own wife, when the time came for him to marry and provide an heir. For what man, who had believed himself to have been excluded from his parents’ lives because of their all-consuming love for each other, would ever want to inflict that same neglect upon his own children?

Ellie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue as she chose her next words carefully. ‘I am sure that both your mother, and the dowager, understand your feelings enough to realise you will need time in which to completely absorb and adjust your thinking concerning the things you have been told this evening.’

Justin glanced at her. ‘How would you feel if you were to learn that your own father had not been who you thought all these years?’

Ellie shrugged. ‘I hope that I would eventually find a way to come to terms with that truth.’

Justin’s eyes glittered. ‘That would surely depend upon who your father is!’

‘Was,’ she corrected softly.

‘Well…yes,’ he conceded awkwardly.

‘It appears your own father was something of a hero.’ Ellie said, sensing that they were now talking slightly at odds with each other, as if Justin’s conversation was about something entirely different to her own. ‘And I have every reason to believe, despite never having met him, that my father was an honourable man, at least.’

‘Yes.’

‘Unless…’ she eyed him warily ‘…you have heard otherwise?’

Too late Justin realised that he had allowed his mother’s revelations, and an overindulgence of brandy after not eating enough at dinner, to loosen his tongue in a way he would not otherwise have done and had now appeared to have cast doubts in Ellie’s mind about her own father.

How much worse would those doubts be if she were ever to discover that both Justin and the Earl of Richmond, suspected Dryden Litchfield of being her real father, as a result of his having raped her mother!

Damn it, here he was, wallowing in self-pity—probably exacerbated by that overindulgence of brandy, the effects of which seemed to have dissipated entirely during the course of this current conversation—when the truth was his own father had been a hero of major proportions, his mother, too, when they had both decided to travel to places that were often highly dangerous.

What an idiot he had been. How utterly bloody selfish. Instead of getting blind drunk, what he should have done earlier this evening was get down on his knees and thank his mother for all that she and his father had sacrificed for their king and country.

His mother had been right, of course, in that he had forgotten those years before he went away to boarding school. Happy and contented years when Justin had his mother’s almost undivided attention, interspersed with weeks or months when his father would return to them and the three of them would then do those things together.

Eleanor, on the other hand, had no memories whatsoever of any father, either in her childhood, or now. Frederick would have been less than useless, he thought acerbically. And the one Justin might give her, if Litchfield should indeed prove to be her father, was nothing short of a nightmare.

‘I have not heard anything detrimental about Henry Rosewood, no,’ he answered carefully.

‘You seemed to imply otherwise a moment ago…?’

‘If that is so, then I apologise. I assure you, they are nothing more than the ramblings of an inebriated man.’ He swung his booted feet to the floor before sitting up on the side of the bed. ‘I apologise for having disturbed your rest, Eleanor. I believe I shall now go to my own bedchamber and endeavour to sleep off the effects of my over-indulgence.’

There was no denying that he had been inebriated when he’d first entered Ellie’s bedchamber, but she did not believe that to be the case now. Nor did she care for the way in which the conversation had turned to the subject of her own father just a few minutes ago, then just as quickly been deflected by Justin. As if he were privy to some information which he did not intend to share with her…

His next comment in no way alleviated that suspicion. ‘Good lord, look at the time!’ He glanced down at the watch he had taken from the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘You are right, my mother and grandmother will be returning at any moment and they must not find me here in your bedchamber when they do.’ He replaced his pocket watch before straightening in preparation for departing.

Ellie now sat up against the headboard of the bed, her legs curled up beneath her. ‘Justin, you would…share the information with me, if you were to learn anything of my father which might damage the dowager duchess in society?’